Final reading.(list of books to reread before death)(Bibliography)

EVER SINCE I learnt the English language at the age of twelve, with a Biggles book and a German-English dictionary in front of me some sixty-seven years ago, I have kept a list of every book I have read. And one lesson which arises from that list is that one tends to read important books when one is still too young to understand all their beauty, knowledge and meaning. They should be read again later in life, and certainly as a final gesture of departure from it.

So here is my list, compiled some years ago, of books I want to read again before death. It is highly improbable that time will permit it. I have not listed any books read for the first time in the last twenty years, to keep the list from becoming so long that only Methuselah (see Genesis 5:27) could have done justice to it.

The list comes under four priority headings. Readers may like to prepare their own lists for comparison.

PRIORITY ONE

Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham Doktor Faustus and Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann Richard III, The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, Macbeth, The Tempest by Shakespeare (I may subconsciously have chosen some of the plays most used for operas)

PRIORITY TWO

Ivanhoe and Kenilworth by Sir Walter Scott Jew Suss by Lion Feuchtwanger The Book of San Michele by Axel Munthe The Arabian Nights by Richard Burton The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel Royal Game, Amok and Letter from an Unknown Woman by Stefan Zweig